The Makeup Insider
The Makeup Insider is a fortnightly one-on-one podcast exploring the life and career of makeup artists, hosted by freelance mua Vanessa Barney.. Finding your community of other likeminded mua’s – the creative, artistic, talkative, flexible, adaptable with a good eye for colour kind-of-people, can often be daunting. Like, where do you start? The Makeup Insider is designed for just that. To build a collaborative online community of artists to build their confidence, connections and help drive their career to the next level.If you’re just starting out or have been in the industry for a long time, tune in now, check out the key takeaways in the show notes and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Find Vanessa @vanessabarney @the.makeupinsider
The Makeup Insider
You Were Born Enough: Adam Garland on Small Towns, Big Industry, and Letting Go
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Adam Garland has worked backstage, assisted Sam McKnight, and had two shots at getting onto Guido Palau's team. Right now he's in his dad's garage in Somerset, UK, building a hair education platform from scratch. In this episode we talk about how he broke into session work (Model Mayhem, zero plan), the real cost of working for free, imposter syndrome, addiction and recovery, why chasing the agency dream was holding him back, and what changed when he finally let it go. He also shares the products he genuinely uses on set and why the humble ponytail elastic deserves way more respect than it gets.
- How Adam fell into hairdressing at 14 and went from a village salon to Vidal Sassoon, Tony & Guy, and eventually session work
- Finding his way into editorial around 2008-2010 via Model Mayhem, testing before he even knew testing was a thing
- Assisting Sam McKnight backstage at Chanel with Karl Lagerfeld and Kendall Jenner in the chair
- What nobody tells you about walking into those environments for the first time when you're from a small town
- The industry language nobody teaches you: options, confirms, releases, pencils, hard outs
- The pay debate: why working for free is not a free university, it's one day of university
- His experience on Guido Palau's team, twice, and why it didn't work out either time
- Addiction, recovery, and how starting his recovery journey around 2018 changed everything
- Why Sam McKnight's team stood by him for five years through the hard stuff
- AI in the creative industry and why "AI slop" is the wrong response
- Letting go of the agency dream and what happened to his career when he did
- Building sessionhair.com: 1:1 mentoring, a free initial consult, and an education platform coming soon
- Archive research and why knowing your references is how you find your visual identity
Products covered in this episode:
- Bedhead TIGI Queen for a Day thickening spray
- Keune Get a Grip texturiser
- Keune Sea Foam
- Sam McKnight Modern Hairspray
- Session Kit elastics (sessionkit.co.uk)
Connect with Adam
